Already Dead: A California Gothic Read Free

belowdecks—maybe an officer or two had been more widely read; maybe the officer he’d struck—studying, reciting, often getting passionate about things that didn’t matter to most people. The others had always given space to the tall man, a natural leader because of his size, intelligence, and sweetness.
    “I came here,” Van Ness said, trying to speak carefully, “because I thought you might have something further to teach me.”
    “Teach you? Did I ever teach you? We read a couple books. Then what?”
    “I don’t know—what?”
    “Do you think we’re educated men? I haven’t spoken to a college professor in my life. I could have done UCLA on a basketball thing, but I just skated on by. What did we really understand of Wittgenstein?”
    “I know what we liked about him—”
    “That he rejected his whole order of thought, yeah, and started fresh halfway through his life.”
    “His independence even from his own truths—”
    “But we didn’t understand those truths. On the Pequod we were just two assholes who collected big words. Everybody knew we were full of shit but us.”
    Van Ness was astonished. “That’s very sad.”
    “No. It has no value one way or the other.”
    “I’m sick,” Van told him.
    “Sick?”
    Van Ness said, “I’m not well.”
    “Not well…That sounds even worse.”
    “It is.”
    “That sounds like ‘a lengthy illness.’”
    “That’s right.”
    “‘Has died after a lengthy illness.’”
    10 / Denis Johnson

    Van Ness put his face in his hands.
    “Dying, huh? That’s a very animal thing to do.”
    “Is that all you can think of to say to me?”
    “All? No. I can bullshit till Christmas. I can spew reams, man.” Frankenstein looked nervous, bopping his foot, rubbing his fingertips rapidly with his thumb, chewing his lip. Van Ness recognized these as Frank’s signs of anger. Intimidated by his own size, he denied himself any wilder expressions.
    There was nothing here for Van, but he couldn’t stop himself, not after five hundred miles spent rehearsing these thoughts. “Maybe we were posing, sure. But you opened the door for me. Wittgenstein, Spinoza—”
    “Nietzsche.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Yeah? And why not Hobbes, and Locke? Why not Marx?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Because they were pointed toward the depersonalized robot zombie Earth we now inhabit. I’m pointed toward the personal, the subjective, the much more deeply real. And I’ve gone on travelling in that direction.
    You—you cry, you weep, you want a theory to eat like a pill and make it all go away.”
    “You misunderstand me. Fuck you.”
    “If you’re dying, then what you really have to do, man, what you’re really gonna have to do most deeply now, is go ahead and die. Just animal right on out. Nice knowing you.”
    Van Ness said nothing for a few minutes while the giant chain-lit another Camel and smoked it away with a series of little convulsions, going into and out of the firelight repeatedly to flick the ash.
    “I’ve had those golf clubs for years. I took a nine iron to the walls because I heard the mothers inside there scurrying around and whispering. Part of this, yeah,” Frankenstein said, “was psychotic bullshit.
    But there are actual people involved, too, taking advantage, you know, of the chemical dementia. I wanted to split their heads open. I know who they are, some of them. They’re shooting some kind of mist, some kind of spray, into the windows at night. I can hear it leaking into the car, man, when I’m driving. Oh yeah! Oh yeah! I can feel it on my skin.
    I yanked the guts out from under the hot tub, let the water out, turned the bastard upside down—okay. Nothing there. I took that nine iron and smashed through the floorboard in the panel Already Dead / 11

    truck, the Chevy, and I got one, man! I stabbed its face to shit with a screwdriver, blood all over my hands, my shirt, it was like a waterfall.
    Got up the next morning, the blood was gone. Not a trace.